The New York City Blackout of 1977: The History of the Power Failure that Led to Looting and Arson Across the Big Apple
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Introduction
New Yorkers wearing shirts commemorating the blackout in 1977
The New York City Blackout of 1977
“Perhaps the most significant effects of the blackout were those felt by public and private organizations with responsibility for the economic and social activities of New York City and its inhabitants. In many cases, these organizations were ill-prepared for the blackout and much of the chaos, economic loss and individual inconvenience resulted from this lack of preparedness.” – The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s “Impact Assessment of the 1977 New York Blackout Report”
Throughout history, light has been associated with goodness and darkness has been a connotation for evil. This is no coincidence, given that many bad deeds that take place in the world under the cover of darkness. It’s no surprise civilizations have always valued the ability to keep light present, even when the sun goes down and the world itself becomes dark. Beginning with the first discovery of fire, men and women have struggled with ways to tame it for their use so that they might have a sense of safety at night. Just as a roaring fire lit at the mouth of a cave would keep out four-legged predators, so it was widely believed that electric lights could discourage marauders of the two-legged kind.
But what happens when the awesome – and occasionally awful – power of nature snatches light away from those who depend on it to feel safe? This question was answered in a most dismaying way in July 1977 when New York City was plunged into darkness for over 24 hours following a thunderstorm. New Yorkers across the city quickly learned that without the light, they could fall prey to looting and violence of just about every kind imaginable. It did not help that this disaster occurred at a time when the city was under more stress than usual due to a poor economy and frequent reports of a new murder by a serial killer calling himself the “Son of Sam.”
On the other side, for some, the opportunity to take things without much danger of getting caught was about survival, a chance to stock up on items that they felt they needed but could not afford to buy. For others, the looting was a way to blow off steam and strike back at what they perceived to be an unjust system that kept them from having the things they wanted in life. There was even a third group comprised of people who told themselves that what they were doing was not really stealing since the stores were left unguarded and someone else would take the items if they did not.
Working near those bent on destruction during that terrible night were men and women trying to save and restore what was being lost. Police, firefighters and workers from Con Ed electric company toiled away to try to restore some semblance of order to the city, but unfortunately, by the time they accomplished their tasks, each group had lost more than it won. The police arrested thousands but knew that they missed thousands more. The firefighters put out many fires, but many more spread their destructive flames through homes and businesses of people just trying to make a living. And those men who worked through the night to restore power quickly found themselves accused of negligence for letting it go out in the first place. Overall, the blackout yielded many losers and few winners, for even those who got away with looting and arson would have to live with their own consciences. In the wake of the blackout, Mayor Abe Beame may have put it best when he complained, “We've seen our citizens subjected to violence, vandalism, theft and discomfort. The Blackout has threatened our safety and has seriously impacted our economy. We've been needlessly subjected to a night of terror in many communities that have been wantonly looted and burned. The costs when finally tallied will be enormous.”
The New York City Blackout of 1977: The History of the Power Failure that Led to Looting and Arson Across the Big Apple looks at one of the most controversial days in the city’s history. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the blackout like never before, in no time at all.
The New York City Blackout of 1977: The History of the Power Failure that Led to Looting and Arson Across the Big Apple
Chapter 1: The Dark, Heat and Disquiet of a Pre-Electric Age
Chapter 2: Coping Got Progressively Harder
Chapter 4: Pain Begets Kindness
Chapter 5: An Act of God or Gross Negligence?
Chapter 1: The Dark, Heat and Disquiet of a Pre-Electric Age
“On a muggy dog-day evening last week, a vagrant summer storm knocked out high-voltage power lines in the near New York suburbs-and within the hour returned 9 million people to the dark, heat and disquiet of a pre-electric age. …for the 25 hours it lasted, it stopped commerce, stymied transportation, blackened the night, sheltered the lawless, turned high rises into prisons, made water a luxury and air conditioning a nostalgic memory. And it underscored once again the fragility of urban America in the last quarter of the twentieth century-a state of dependence so total that a burst of lightning could shut down the nation’s largest city as surely and nearly as completely as a neutron bomb. For a night and a day, nothing worked except telephones, transistor radios and a certain gritty New York resilience in the face of disaster. Subways ran dead. Elevators hung high in their shafts. Water pumps failed, and with them sinks, tubs and toilets. Streetlights and stoplights went out. Traffic thinned and slowed to a wary crawl. Refrigerators and air coolers quit. Commuter lines stalled. Stores, banks, businesses and stock exchanges closed. Theaters went dark. Office towers stood nearly empty. Airports shut down. Hospitals switched to backup generators when they worked-and flashlight medicine when they did not. Produce wilted and frozen food melted in stores. The stranded flaked out on hotel-lobby floors. The mayor held his first crisis councils by candlelight.” – Newsweek, “Heart of Darkness”, July 1977
Having suffered through a stiflingly hot summer in 1977, the residents of New York City may have initially taken comfort when a severe thunderstorm passed over the city on the night of July 13. However, at about 8:37 pm, a bolt of lightning hit two extra-high-voltage lines in Westchester County in New York State. Though in no way resembling the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple, Westchester County was nonetheless served by the same electricity carrier, Consolidated Edison, that served the “City That Never Sleeps.”
As the Chief System Operator with Consolidated Edison, or Con Ed, Charlie Durkin was among the first to understand what had happened. “Around 6:00 I headed home. I got home early enough that I got in the pool with the kids. Somewhere around 8:00. it was clear that thunderstorms were going to move in, so we all got out. … My daughter was brushing her teeth and looked out the bathroom window and said, ‘What's wrong with the sky, Dad? It looks strange.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, it's because of all the lightning; there's so much of it, it just stays lit.’ … I got a call maybe a little bit after nine asking me to call the system operator. I called in. And finally said, ‘There's no other choice.’ The only alternative was to disconnect customers.” Now seriously concerned, Durkin warned those under him, “You know, you're gonna lose the whole thing. Tell him this is a dire emergency, if he can give us anymore to give it to us.”
As the Associated Press later reported, “Lightning storms in Westchester County first knocked out transmission lines that might have drawn power from other utilities, then hit a large power transformer, which exploded. The explosion forced shutdown of a large nuclear generating plant nearby, putting a heavier load on other power plants on a muggy night when demand was high for air conditioning. Additional lines were also hit. To keep the system running, Consolidated Edison ordered voltage reductions, first of 5 per cent, then 8 per cent. But when another plant, in the borough of Queens, tripped out, safety devices designed to protect against overloads shut the whole network down at 9:34 p.m.”
The home of “Big Allis,” the generator that shut down that night.
At first, no one knew how widespread the darkness was, and even then, many in the city remembered the terrible blackout that knocked out power across much of the state in 1965. Many people had just assumed that nothing as bad as that one could ever happen again, as Time later noted: “For a short while after the lights flickered out, most New Yorkers refused to believe that a crisis was at hand and gamely carried on. Broadway actors performed under the uncertain beams of flashlights held by stagehands: the nude cast of Oh! Calcutta! unable to grope to their dressing rooms, borrowed clothes from members of the audience and went home in cabs. Waiters at Manhattan restaurants served patrons by candlelight. Buses were delayed only slightly by darkened traffic lights. Garbage trucks whined as usual on their nightly rounds. Mayor Abraham Beame, assuming, like many citizens, that a fuse had blown, adlibbed a quip during a campaign speech at the Co-op City Traditional Synagogue in The Bronx. ‘See.’ he said. ‘This is what you get for not paying your bills.’ Gradually, however, the realization took over that the unthinkable had happened: at 9:34 on one of the summer’s most sweltering nights, air conditioners, elevators, subways, lights, water pumps -all the electric sinews of a great modern city-had stopped. They would not work again for as long as 25 hours. …the effects were nationwide. TV networks stopped broadcasting for several minutes. The flow of teletyped news from the A.P. and U.P.I. was interrupted, then limped along under jury rigs. Wall Street’s banks, brokerages, and stock and commodities exchanges shut down for a day.”
Years later, everyone in New York that night still remembered where they were when the lights went out. Ernesto Quiñonez remembered, “I was playing handball with my friends. And you can still play at night because there was a lot of lampposts around Jefferson Park. But then all of a sudden they started going out one by one, like -- pop, pop, pop -- and ah, we're like, ‘Wow, what's happening?’” Likewise, Carl St. Martin, at that time a medical student, recounted, “That night I'm on the third floor, windows open. It was very hot. So people were outside. And suddenly the TV went off. The light went off. The noise outside in the street quickly stopped for a second and suddenly you heard a ‘gasp’ because everybody at the same time realized something had happened.”
When the blackout begain, it seemed that New York would rise to the occasion, exhibiting the kind of calm courage that so often inspires the world when the city has faced it most critical moments. Newsweek described some of the scenes across the city during the first hours of the blackout: “New York’s Eight Million affect a kind of Battle of Britain good cheer in the teeth of the city’s frequent catastrophes-a mood reinforced this time by the repeated assurances of radio newscasters that everybody was coping. There were frightened screams in the streets when the light first died; a woman near lower Manhattan’s Hudson riverfront clung to her son and wailed, ‘Don’t leave me alone! Don’t leave me alone!’ But much of the city responded to the dark with a nearly desperate bonhomie. Strangers exchanged words and kindnesses. Cars honked hello at one another. Saloons poured booze on the house, some by intent, some in despair at customers walking away from their tabs. Spontaneous parties formed on sidewalks. Jugs of wine passed across backyard fences. Heads popped out windows and, in good-natured plagiary from the movie ‘Network,’ bellowed: ‘I’m mad, and I’m not going to take it anymore!’”
In some ways, the 1965 blackout, as bad as it was, proved in 1977 to have been something of a blessing in disguise, as those who had lived through it were at least somewhat prepared to deal with this one. Durkin explained, “[A] Transit Authority system operator had been on duty in 1965. When the system separated [in 1977] …we began getting fluctuating conditions on the power system. And he observed, himself, that this did not look good, and looked sort of like 1965. He saw… swings of power going through the 25-cycle system and things like that. So he decided to hold the trains in the stations, all right, which he did, so there were only two trains stranded, which is why there wasn't all of the news on people being evacuated out of subways and that kind of stuff. It turned out that that action also was such that [the] 59th Street generating station, which was a 25-cycle power supply station, stayed up… So, we got power from 59th Street into the control center. So we had good power, ventilation, air conditioning so working conditions were pretty good. Well, you… quickly understand that electricity is a kind of a keystone for civility and if we can get the streetlights back on, the traffic lights working, and all that kind of thing, there was a much better likelihood that the police and so forth can maintain control. So we, you know, worked earnestly to try to accomplish that.”
Jacque Nevard, also with the Transit Authority, recalled, “At 9:30 sharp we began getting power surges and A.C. power failures; which took the form of signal blackouts. Motormen started calling the train masters. The train masters have dispatchers in a ring around them, and sometime between 9:30 and 9:34 they put out the word by radio to the motormen to move immediately to the closest station. They anticipated we may be in for a failure, so they took the precaution of ordering all trains moving to stations. As a result of approximately 150 trains normally operating at that time, only seven, as of reports of 11:30 P.M., were caught between stations.”
While people were trying to cope in the city’s poorest parts, others were trying to come up with a survival strategy while trapped in wealthier areas. Kevin Zraly was working as a wine steward that night at one of the city’s most popular and elegant haunts, and he would later provide a surreal description of his experience that night: “Imagine yourself on top of One World Trade Center on the 107th floor. Windows On The World restaurant was one of the most magical places on earth, not just in New York City. On a clear day you could see 90 miles, planes flying below you. And 9:30, anybody in the restaurant business will tell you, is crunch time. I was walking the floor, and all of a sudden I look to my right and Brooklyn is not there anymore. Okay, it's just, where did Brooklyn go? And then I quickly glance over, Queens is gone. It's blackout, there's no, no lights whatsoever. And as soon as I get up to the window and we're overlooking Manhattan, downtown Manhattan, whoosh, lights go out for us. … One of the things about the Windows on the World right from the very beginning was its dress code. You had to have a jacket and tie. The general manager said to me, ‘You can tell people they can take their jackets off.’ Take their jackets off? You know, ‘Okay, you can take your jackets off.’ Next thing, the ties are coming off. Next thing, you know, people loosening their shirts. The general manager got up, and immediately spoke, ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Everybody's getting champagne.’ … We were on an island in the sky isolated from whatever else was happening in all of New York City. We had these emergency lights, but it wasn't enough. I mean, so we started bringing candles in. In hindsight, I don't think that was a good idea because the candles also gave off heat. Air conditioning now has been out for, since 9:30. And but still people, some people we had to ask to leave. It was that kind of thing, you know. They liked the champagne part. It sort of sounds like the Titanic when, when we talk about, ‘Did the band play on,’ you know? We had a three-piece combo of piano, bass, and guitar. The piano continued on.”
Raphael Concorde’s picture of Windows on the World
Chapter 2: Coping Got Progressively Harder
“But spirits frayed as New York’s longest night since ‘65 wore on into the dawn and coping got progressively harder. Simply moving about became a hardship. Pedestrians bumped through the dark, looking for Samaritans with flashlights or pocket lighters. Most of the nearly 200 subway trains then on the tracks managed to crawl to the nearest stations, thanks to a warning from a quick-witted dispatcher; still, seven trains carrying 1,000 passengers were stuck between stations for hours-and the entire system folded thereafter for the duration. Commuter lines to Westchester and Long Island went dead, marooning thousands of homebound suburbanites. Perhaps a thousand of them spent the night at Penn Station, curled into chairs or sprawled on the floor. Outside, cabbies hawked and sold rides to suburbia at marked-up rates. Buses and cabs kept moving as long as their gasoline held out; with gas pumps dead, there was no way to refuel them. The mass demise of 10,000 stop signals brought auto traffic near chaos-a nightmare avoided only by a measure of self-restraint and the imposed discipline of an army of cops, meter maids and civilian volunteers. One youth guided cars through a clogged Manhattan intersection with flags, another with a flare, yet another with strings of firecrackers noisily signaling ‘stop’ or ‘go.’ A 10-year-old girl took over a crossing of her own, with such aplomb that even police cars stopped at her direction.” – Newsweek, “Heart of Darkness”
In spite of the best efforts of so many, the longer the blackout continued, the more the city’s situation began to gradually deteriorate. The wire services reported about some of the hardships suffered by residents across the area: “Thousands of home‐bound travelers were trapped in subway tunnels and along suburban railroad lines by last night's blackout. There were no initial reports of panic, however, and although many trains remained stranded in sweltering tunnels at least two hours after the blackout began, many others were able to coast into stations and discharge passengers with ease. In a subway tunnel at Broadway at 19th Street, for example, Officer Thomas Duffey of the Transit Authority Police guided 1,500 passengers out of a train without incident. But George Thune, a Long Island Rail Road aide, said passengers on 12 to 14 commuter trains backed up and stranded by the power loss in Jamaica, Queens, were still awaiting buses at 11 P.M. Trains drawing power from the Long Island Lighting Company, which was unaffected by the blackout, were able to get through, as were diesel trains on the nonelectrified portion of the line in Eastern Long Island. Outside Grand Central Terminal, cabdrivers called out ‘Yonkers and Westchester,’ attracting a steady stream of commuters. Inside the station at 11 P.M., passengers waited in the subway aboard a Lexington Avenue downtown express. The Times Square subway concourse was crowded with people waiting for news and snacking on donuts and fried chicken from subway stands.”
Within minutes after the lights went out, a chain reaction began that was quickly felt around the world, as both of the city’s major airports, JFK and LaGuardia, were forced to shut down, resulting in the cancellation or rerouting of more than 120 flights. With no way to get home, nearly 15,000 people were trapped in the airport for the rest of the evening, sleeping on benches or floors and constantly hoping the lights would come back on and they could fly out. Newsweek relayed the story of one flight’s diversion from JFK: A pilot was nosing his cargo plane down through the moonlit night, bound for John F. Kennedy International Airport with a cargo of strawberries, when New York abruptly vanished beneath him. “Where is Kennedy, airport?” he radioed helplessly. Head for Philadelphia, the control tower answered. ‘What am I supposed to do with the berries?” asked the captain. “Eat them,” said the tower.” – Newsweek, “Heart of Darkness”
Meanwhile, those who were near or in their cars at the time of the blackout fared little better, as hours dragged on while parking attendants were forced to manually compute each and every fee owed to the airport.
In another part of town, firefighter Vincent Dunn saw some things that immediately made him aware he and his fellow firefighters were in for a long night: “I was up in the office. I was catching up on some paperwork and having a cup of coffee and the lights dimmed. The emergency generator roared on and somebody shouted ‘Blackout,’ you know?’ … [Soon] I'm trying to scramble to find out what the big issues are. I called up the fire battalions seeing how things are in their districts. The phones are evidently working. And I told 'em, ‘Hey, we gotta go down to the subways, make sure those people stuck in those hot trains don't bail out on those third rail tracks.’ And then we have these portable generators that are useful. You know, hospitals, that's our first priority. ... Then, you know, I got called to go respond to a fire. And I never returned to the firehouse.”
Law enforcement officers were also caught completely unaware by the event and Officer Patrick Marshall later recalled, “I was working my last 4-to-12 in a set of five. It was a beastly hot day. I distinctly remember it was horifcally [sic] hot. … We didn't know it was a big blackout. The lights went out, but who knew if the lights were gonna stay out. There was no AM/FM radios in the patrol cars at the time. So you had no radio communication with the outside. Our portable radio had died because of the repeaters being out. Well, we go back into the station house, and when we went into the station house that's when we really knew that the pot was cooking. … The station house was in darkness, complete and utter darkness. Everybody's walking around with flashlights, some candles, and it looked like a cross between a Boris Karloff movie and Car 54. The sergeant said, ‘Go out, do the best you can, come back in a little while. We're gonna have a better plan in place. But go out and do what you can do.’"
While they were not helpful for the police, radio stations proved vital in getting out the word about what had happened, as most people still had and frequently listened to battery-powered radios at the time. One reporter provided the bad news: “All five boroughs are affected so that's the word. Seven million people are now without power.” On the other hand, another reporter tried to put a positive spin on what he was seeing in Midtown, telling listeners that “there are people directing traffic at the intersections. I assume many of them are policemen. Some of them, obviously, are just volunteers, people who wanted to pitch in. But in general people are taking it in good spirit, and almost a little conviviality going on.”
As is often the case, even in the midst of crisis there were moments of humor, such as this exchange that was broadcast:
“Reporter: Where were you when the lights went out?
Man: Radio City Music Hall.
Reporter: What happened in the music hall?
Man: All of sudden all the lights went out. No picture, no sound, nothing. And a man made an announcement about, ah, the power is off in the whole city.
Reporter: And you're waiting for the subway now?
Man: No, there's no subway running.
Reporter: So what are you doing here?
Man: I'm on TV.”
Joyce Purnick was one of the brave journalists tasked with covering the blackout. She recalled part of her night, “My beat at the Post was covering politics. I went running over to City Hall, and I spent the night in the command center where we got regular briefings on what they said was going on in the city. The blackout was not the city's fault, but, um, it was an opportunity for the mayor Abe Beame to show the people of New York that he was in control. … I'm not sure to this day if he, or even the police commissioner, actually knew what was going on, because if they did, they didn't tell us.”
Mayor Beame
In addition to keeping their listeners apprised of what, if any, progress was being made to restore power, reporters also shared reports on the effects of the outages on various areas across the city. One newsman reported, “At Bellevue, the city's largest hospital, emergency generator service has been halted by an electrical fire. Steps are being taken to protect the lives of patients on respirators and other necessary electrical equipment. Dr. Stephen Schwartz of New York's Lenox hospital says emergency equipment is working there, but they are bracing for a possible flood of patients.”
One of the things working against the city was that it was so tall. In 1977, as now, New Yorkers depended on elevators to make it to and from their offices and homes each day, and few people could easily make it up 30 or 40 flights of stairs. Newsweek explained how “Manhattan’s high-rise residential and business towers lost their glamour for groundlings. Water pumps died, reducing upper-story tenants to fetching pailsful from fire hydrants--or even boiling water from toilets. The World Trade Center took an hour and a half getting one elevator working, and an hour and a half more evacuating the last diners from Windows on the World. The Fire Department had to cut through the back of an elevator in the New York Hilton to rescue eight passengers. Getting home at night and to work next day became an Alpinist’s adventure-a wheezy climb lit by flashlight and candle through Stygian stairwells. In the leveling democracy of the blackout, the city’s biggest banker, Walter Wriston of Citibank, had to walk down 23 flights and up fifteen to get from his flat to his office-and the Metropolitan Opera’s principal cellist, Jascha Silberstein, labored up sixteen stories, lighting his way with a cigarette lighter and lugging his $65,000 cello.”
In addition to transportation and safety challenges, there were also issues related to recordkeeping, because even though computer technology was far from as important as it would become, there were still many organizations that depended on electrically powered computers to do business. The New York Times reported, “The general calm in Grand Central was eerily shattered by the periodic clanging of burglar alarms, apparently set off by the electrical failures. But a couple kissing on the steps of the station seemed undisturbed. In a midtown office of Trans World Airlines, three employees — Ed Connolly, Judy Hamann and Anne Schmidt — were isolated in darkness, unable to do anything to reschedule flights. With hundreds of major computer systems shut down because of the blackout. brokerage firms, banks, securities and commodity exchanges, retailers and government agencies faced a massive catchupoperation when power was restored. Computer experts said that a major loss of stored data was unlikely, but that work in progress when the power failure began would generally be lost and would have to be redone. ‘Wall Street will be hurt the worst’ said Donald R. Marsh, a district manager for Honeywell Information Systems in Manhattan. He said about half the large computer operations in the city customarily ran through the night. At the Federal Reserve Board of New York, the giant computers that keep track of the so‐called clearing balances of the city's large commercial banks were shut down. Normally, the New York staff works through the night comparing statistics for a regularly weekly report on the nation's money supply and balances, which comes out each Thursday. … At some financial institutions, there was considerable confusion. A spokesman for Citibank, New York's largest, said, ‘It's a 24‐hour operation and all our computers are down.’”
Computers were also needed to handle emergency calls, as the article observed: “The emergency numbers of 911 and 411 were flooded with calls at first, but a spokesman for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company said that long‐distance telephone service was “working well” after an initial period of congrestion that ended about 11:45 P.M. Earlier in the evening, the company had urged people to limit the number of calls into New York. Herbert Lennon, a company officer, said the company was using emergency power, much as it had during the blackout in 1965.”
However, while some carried on into the night, whether trying to continue working or stuck without any set plans and seemingly without a care in the world, much of the city stood on the precipice, poised to descend into chaos.
Chapter 3: Pillaging
“In sweltering Harlem, people were already in the streets when darkness fell, rapping, sipping wine, playing dominoes, catching the little flutters of breeze beneath the airless tenements. There was a throaty mass scream when the lights went out, and then a little festival of blackness-bonfires in the streets, a blast of soul and salsa, a torchlight parade down upper Broadway. But within minutes, the night was alight with fires, the pavement alive with looters, the music drowned out by whooping sirens and shattering glass. The pillaging ran until dawn, unchecked and unabashed. ‘Being that the lights are out and the [African Americans] are going hungry,’ a black kid boasted, ‘we’re going to take what we want-and what we want is what we need.’” – Newsweek, “Heart of Darkness”
As the hours passed and the sun went down, leaving the city in complete darkness, violence spread with shocking speed. Remaining in his third-story place, St. Martin succinctly described the sudden transformation: “It just happened. Like a tinderbox. It went from being lights to being looting.” Decades later, in the wake of another blackout in 2003, the New York Times looked back on the 1977 blackout and compared the difference in people’s actions that night to the calm that prevailed in 1965: “In many neighborhoods, veterans of the 1965 blackout headed to the streets at the first sign of darkness. But many of them did not find the same spirit. In poor neighborhoods across the city, looting and arson erupted. On streets like Brooklyn's Broadway the rumble of iron store gates being forced up and the shattering of glass preceded scenes of couches, televisions, and heaps of clothing being paraded through the streets by looters at once defiant, furtive and gleeful.”
Given his background in firefighting, Dunn was well-positioned to elaborate on how society could break down in a gradual manner, and how that would lead to cascading problems of different kinds: “If you don't control the crime problem and the people causing the disorder, it becomes a fire problem. The dispatcher ordered us to go from fire to fire. You were driving in the streets. People were waving to you for help, and you couldn't stop. Buildings were burning. Cars in the street were burning. Garbage in lots were burning. You know, you'd hear the dispatcher, "No companies available. No companies available." They would only send us to big store fires. You know, we would go to those big supermarket fires, appliance store fires, which were being broken into, looted, and burned. … Fire is a special effect. You light a car, you've got a spectacular event. Fire, you know, it's got noise. It's got smoke. It's got flame. It's got sound. It was a crazy scene, you know, it was something out of like a world war.”
Chris Vanager lived with his mother in an apartment building during the blackout and later admitted, “By 10:00 -- that's when I started to hear the noises. And, first my mother goes, ‘What is that?’ You heard these bumping noises. Just bump-bump-bump-bump outside. And so my mother opens the door and she looks. And I stick my head out, and the staircase door was open a little bit and you see a washing machine going up the stairs. Then after that a refrigerator comes upstairs. Then those giant furniture TV's, you know, the old Zeniths with the, the sound system in 'em and the record player, those started going up. And it was just box after box after box after box. … All I remember was people with stuff -- coats, clothes, like people just have this stuff draped over their arms like, ‘Yo, you wanna buy this? You wanna buy that?’ They stole clothes, electronics, just everything you could think of.”
During the crisis, laws and policies put in place to protect lives and property were sometimes used to take one or both. Writer Bruce Porter noted, “Ace Pontiac stored 50 brand new Pontiacs in its garage and the, and the fire department had a rule that if you stored cars in, inside a building you had to leave the key in the ignition and you had to put $2 worth of gas in the tank. Well, all 50 of these cars vanished in the first hour and a half.
Part of the problem in maintaining control was that the police who were called in were told, because of problems with transportation, to report to the precincts closest to their homes, not to their own precincts. This meant that neighborhoods and suburbs were better protected than business areas and lower income blocks.
Moreover, and not surprisingly, the city’s policemen were completely overwhelmed. Officer Patrick Marshall discussed some of the actions the police tried to take, despite the large numbers of people they had to deal with: “There was people everywhere. Hundreds. Hundreds per block. We responded to a call for assistance from Wyckoff Heights Hospital. And the staff in the emergency room was being hard-pressed to keep up with the injuries because the looters were suffering such vicious cuts from the glass. There was blood everywhere. There was people with some hellacious injuries, and it really was starting to slide. …Our instructions were, ‘Do the best you can.’ And we did the best we could. We had sticks. We had our hands. You'd grab people and just toss them out. We were so outnumbered, we'd push them back as far as we could. The people would only respond so far. And then they would start hurling rocks and bottles at us. And then there was a pitched battle in the street. After a while there was, what can you do? It was insanity. … Anybody and everybody -- children, women, men, people with jobs, people without jobs. They all got caught up in the moment. They didn't feel like they were committing a crime because the whole general atmosphere, the whole feeling of it, was, ‘Everybody's doing it, why not me?’”
Porter was somewhat sympathetic to some of the looters who were caught: “The first group, who went into the stores 10 minutes after the blackout occurred, these were a criminal element. Then the stores were open. And then another class of looters came in. People who did not have a criminal background, to whom it would not occur to go and smash the window of a store and go in and grab something. But they sat in their hot apartments seeing people run in and grab stuff and they said, ‘You know, I could really use some Pampers.’ These were the people who tended to get arrested. They had never been arrested before, and here they were arrested and charged with stealing a couch, or some clothes. There were not a package of Pampers survived the looting.”
New Yorker Ernesto Quiñonez concurred with the sentiment: “I remember the rattling, and it's a very distinct rattling. A whole bunch of housewives had looted the supermarket at the corner where I used to live and what they had done is that they had taken pantyhose and they had tied shopping carts together so they could make a shopping cart train and then they had loaded all the stuff, all this merchandise, Pampers, toilet paper, food on these carts and were pushing them home. … It was the neighborhoods that had been neglected that rioted, and it was basically people who were poor and hungry. The media paints it as ‘Look at these criminals, it's race!’ But it's not so much race as it is class. Black people didn't go after white people. Latinos did not go after the Italians. It was more about class. We didn't have, so we went, not even after those who had. We went after their stuff! It's an expression of anger. It's an expression of neglect, and it's an expression of need.”
Of course, no one suffered during the night as much as small business owners who lived from one day to the next. Large department stores had the staff and security to protect their property, but “Mom and Pop” operations had no one to depend on but themselves. One of them, Elzora Williamson, later explained, “We had our store, which was entitled Trophies By Syl. It was a sporting goods and trophy shop. We thought of it as more than a store. We taught the young people how to open a bank account, how to fill out the forms. My husband would go with them, show them how to do that. That evening, the lights went out as we were eating. And my husband said, ‘Oh maybe we better get back over there.’ And I said to him, ‘Oh let me do the dishes first.’ I probably lost about an hour. When we got to maybe five, six blocks away from our store we started seeing our merchandise in the street. I just drove up on the sidewalk, and I parked the car directly where the doorway was. The people who were inside when they saw my husband, they said, ‘Here's Mr. Syl. Mr Syl is here,’ and they started running. It was sad in some ways because some people that you saw would be people you would not have expected to see in that capacity. And, and yet they were there. … We had to stay there all night because if we left they were gonna come in and take the rest. There was no police to stop them. Who, who would stop them from taking whatever else was there? … Not only did they loot the stores, they burnt them. And to me, that was the ultimate violation. You took everything, now why are you going to burn the store down as well?”
Alan Rubin also suffered serious losses that night, though he wisely chose to take no chances with his own safety: “I figured, ‘Okay, I'll walk over to the store.’ And I saw a crowd on the side of the store. They were pushing and shoving to get into the store, and people were coming out carrying things. They got out hi-fi. They got out TVs. The store next to me, the owner came over to me, and he says, ‘I'm shooting in the air to scare them away.’ He said, ‘Do you need a gun?’ And I said, ‘No way.’ I said, ‘I'll get hurt if I have a gun.’ I couldn't do anything about it, so I just was watching. And my knees started to shake.”
Newsweek summed up the rampant looting that took place across the city and some of the terrible statistics that came with it: “Teen-agers first, then grade schoolers and grownups rifled shops and markets for clothes, appliances, furniture, television sets, groceries-even 50 Pontiacs from a Bronx dealership. One looter in Flatbush was caught returning a black-and white TV for a color model. Others in Harlem set up shop in an abandoned store and retailed their loot, the offerings ranging from Pro-Keds sneakers for $5 to color consoles for $135. Hospital emergency rooms were jammed with the wounded-many of them cut in encounters with plate-glass windows…And in the ghettos and barrios, four of the city’s five boroughs, the looters and burners owned the night, on a scale and with a fury unmatched since the riots of a decade ago. …the switchoff of ‘77 caught black New York in the midst of the summer’s worst heat wave and in the thrall of depression-level unemployment-and when the lights went out this time, the mean streets simply erupted. The arrest count exploded to a staggering 3,776 before the police largely gave up trying to collar the pillagers and concentrated on containing them. Two looters died. More than 400 cops were hurt. The fire department was swamped with alarms-true and false. The jails were flooded to overflowing-so badly that the city had to reopen the condemned old prison known for its bleak-house aspect and its medieval living conditions as the Tombs. The ‘night of terror,’ in Mayor Abraham Beame’s anguished phrase, spread from slum to slum out of Harlem to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, Jamaica in Queens and the down-and-out South Bronx-and in some neighborhoods flamed on into high-noon daylight. More than 2,000 stores were pillaged, and guestimates of property losses ran as high as $1 billion-enough to qualify the stricken areas for Federal disaster aid. A mile and a half of Brooklyn’s Broadway was put, lights that failed to the torch. Protective metal grills were tom off storefronts with crowbars, battered down with cars and dragged down by brute force.”
Chapter 4: Pain Begets Kindness
“In the commonwealth of darkness, New Yorkers rediscovered their kinship with one another, and celebrated it. In a downtown high-rise, a blind woman descended to the lobby with a candle and offered it around. ‘I have no use for this,’ she said. ‘Someone might need it.’ On an uptown street corner, lawyer Beaufort Clarke lit his way to a pay phone by candle, and someone offered him $20 for it. My God, people need these, he thought, so he repaired to his apartment, collected all the candles he didn’t need, and handed them out in the streets to disbelieving passersby. At a midtown hotel, a young woman found herself abandoned by her date, robbed of her wallet, and stranded miles from her Long Island home. A vacationing deputy sheriff from New Orleans put her in a cab and paid the driver $50 to deliver her there. ‘We’re from Louisiana, honey,’ he drawled. ‘We’re used to trouble.’ It was, the Eight Million told one another, like London in the blitz-a time when pain begets kindness and necessity mother’s invention. At Coney Island, the Wonder Wheel ground to a stop, with one carload of passengers hanging 150 feet high; a thrown-together work gang of policemen and volunteers wound them down by hand. A Baskin Robbins franchise ice cream merchant drove his Lincoln Continental up on the sidewalk and did business as usual-by the light of his headlamps beaming through his show window. On West End Avenue, the lobby of a handsome old high-rise went dark. The building superintendent jumped his car over the curb, nosed up to the front entrance, rigged a hookup between his auto battery and the wiring inside and within ten minutes had the lobby bathed in light.” – Newsweek, “Heart of Darkness”
Obviously, not everyone on the streets participated in the looting. Some, like St. Martin and others with minimal medical training, were simply trying to help in a strange situation, one that in many places resembled a war zone. He explained, “I was in medical school, so, you know, I figured might as well just go and work at the hospital. It was packed. Full-blown -- people outside in the street waiting to get in. I went in, and there were some doctors there. And I explained that I was a medical student and he asked me had I sutured before. And I said, ‘Well, I'd done a little bit but not really.’ He said, ‘Okay, come, come. I'll show you. We need your help. We need your help.’ All night long, I was in a corner just closing up wounds.”
Despite all the looting that was going on, the night the lights went out also produced a surprising number of Good Samaritan stories, including some from very unusual places. Journalist Pete Axthelm told one such story: “The girl walked slowly out of the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue and squinted through rimless glasses at blacked-out Times Square. She was wearing cut-off jeans and a T shirt. Her name was Ginnie, she said, and she had ridden down from Connecticut to visit some friends in Manhattan. She was 20 years old and white, and a bus had just delivered her into a cauldron of the night life that might have scared her even with the lights on. ‘I guess I’ll never get a cab,’ she said. ‘I hope it’s safe to walk.’ Having just arrived in the same area with a busload of horseplayers from The Meadowlands trotting track in New Jersey, I was hoping the same thing. Then suddenly there was a black pimp at our side, along with two tall hookers, and they were shouting for us to walk with them. ‘We’ll make it safe,’ said one of the girls. There was a gap between her teeth as she smiled, and the laugh came from deep in her throat. ‘Nothing else to do. All the customers be scared to go up into hotel rooms with no lights.’ Soon the pimp in his golden threads was leading a small procession up Eighth Avenue. A transistor radio was blaring from somewhere, and two hours into the blackout that was producing destruction and flames in other parts of the city, our unlikely mix of hustlers and passersby was walking jauntily away from fear and danger. ‘Oh, there’s been some trouble,’ the other hooker said with a Spanish accent. ‘I seen six kids jump one guy before, and it made me sick. But most of the night people, we don’t want that. We want to go about our business. Because this is America.’”
Even where the looting was taking place, the plunderers seemed to have respect for some businesses. Journalist Richard Boeth noted, “Some stores, however, were spared. One chain supermarket, disliked in the area for its alleged high prices, was picked clean, but another, more popular supermarket nearby went untouched. A particularly large crowd invaded a chic haberdashery, reputed to have an uppity sales staff, and made off with everything but a solitary espadrille. But a Kress five-and-ten on 106th Street did not suffer so much as a single chipped window. “A lot of the stores in this neighborhood are locally owned,” said Victor Lopez, a teacher in a junior high school. “They weren’t hit as much. Besides, these people knew what they wanted.”
Where goodwill would not preserve the peace, good security sometimes did. Boeth continued, “Some few businesses managed to save themselves by posting guards. Nat Marcus, the owner of a sewing-machine and fabric store called Sav-A-Thon, kept five young men with baseball bats in front of his doors, replaced later by a large truck blocking access to the windows. When the looting around him continued well into Thursday afternoon, Marcus called in nine relatives and employees, loaded his inventory into the truck and drove it home. He plans to restock and reopen the store-if no one burns down his building first. Apartment dwellers as well as store owners were forced out by the rampage. At 12:37 Broadway, in the heart of the Bushwick holocaust, all three families living in the building piled their belongings into station wagons and went to stay with relatives in fear that the building would be put to the torch. ‘There are too many animals here-we’re getting out,’ said Jose Reyes. They had no idea where they would resettle, except that it would not be in Bushwick. ‘We’ll never come back here,’ said Mrs. Reyes, ‘not even to visit.’ As Thursday night loomed and power had still not been restored to much of the city, many police and plain citizens feared there might be an escalation of the looting into a full citywide riot. Cautiously, the mayor and police commissioner asked Gov. Hugh Carey to send in 250 state troopers ‘to help control traffic,’ as they explained. There was no need. After 25 hours of virtually uncontrolled pillage, the looters were spent at last and not a whole lot remained to be smashed and stolen anyway.”
While some in the city were bent on destruction, others were desperately trying to repair the damage done and get the lights back on. Boeth wrote, “Within minutes after the system failed, the Manhattan control center was swarming with engineers and company officials. Lute, who had just finished dinner at his Bronxville home when the lights went out, showed up at 10:10 p.m. to take personal charge of the desperate effort to restore power. The first priority was to get the high-voltage transmission lines energized again, a job far more complicated than simply closing a few circuit breakers. The high-voltage lines, many of which are buried underground, are encased in a jacket of pressurized oil that both cools and insulates them. ‘When you lose the power, you lose the pressure,’ Hauspurg explained, ‘and it takes twenty minutes or more to restore the pressure.’ At the same time, Con Ed’s entire system had to be checked for damage-both by computer as well as by physical inspection. With eleven generating stations, 21 substations and thousands of circuits at 50 locations stretching from Staten Island to Poughkeepsie, Con Ed engineers faced a tedious and lengthy task. As it turned out, except for a transformer at the Buchanan, N.Y., substation that burned out in a premature attempt to restore power to Westchester, the vast system was found to be completely intact.”
Furthermore, for many New Yorkers that night, looting was of no concern. They were gathered in bars and restaurants in Midtown, partying like it was New Year’s Eve instead of the middle of July. One bartender remembered, “This place was jammed, but the only voice I could hear was from this woman who kept demanding more banana Daiquiris. Amazing. Everybody else is worrying about candles and getting some fresh air, and she’s yelling about why we don’t have a blender that works on batteries.” Another man had a similar reaction to the blackout: “I know what time the lights went off, but I’d be hard pressed to tell you when they came back on. The blackout was like a signal to hurry. We all thought of crazy things that we’d normally do over a month’s time-and tried to cram them all into one night.”
New York enjoys a busy nightlife, and people often plan special events months or even years in advance. For that reason as much as any other, there was a sense in many places that the show must go on. Much like the Windows on the World’s band kept playing, the New York Times relayed one story about a dinner party that remained in good spirits: “Six weeks ago, Robert Turner, president of International Trends, won a dinner party for 25 guests at a charity benefit auction for Good Will Industries. The dinner had been donated by Angelo, Donghia, the designer, who was to have it in his town house on the, upper East Side. Mr. Turner bid $2,500 for the evening. ‘I might have gone higher if I had known what a landmark party it was going to be,’ Mr. Turner said. The party took place Wednesday night. Mr. Donghia, with three assistants, prepared the dinner—four pastas, strawberries with zabaglione sauce, and Italian cheesecake. At 9:25 P.M., guests started wending their way to the dining room and garden level. The lights went out. ‘I had 40 candles lit anyway so most of the guests thought it was part of my special effects,’ Mr. Donghia said. ‘Then they realized the music had gone off too.’ ‘Personally, I was indignant with Con Edison and felt we hadn't learned anything from our experiences 12 years ago,’ Mr. Turner said. ‘But no one suffered any inconvenience at the party because that town house is equipped for anything—Mr. Donghia had lots of fans and candles and we sat in the garden where it was cooler. It was really, delightful.’”
In another part of town, another party was held that night, and it also provided its guests with experiences they would never forget. The Times continued, “For 10 years, Karen Lang has been giving ‘surprise’ birthday parties for her husband, George, who is a restaurateur, author and international restaurant consultant. One year, she had the whole neighborhood plastered with ‘Happy Birthday George Lang’ posters, other year she met him on his return by Kennedy airport. She had a huge limousine decorated with balloons and such, staffed with a butler as well as chauffeur and supplied with champagne and party fixings. The party was held on the ride back to their apartment. This year, on July 13, Mr. Lang's birthday, she took over the Cafe de la Paix at the St. Moritz Hotel for an 8 P.M. reception. About 100 guests drank, nibbled on servicheand oysters and watched a parade she had organized along a small section of 59th Street. First came about 70 youngsters, dressed in blue and silver uniforms, playing and carrying birthday banners. Then half an hour later, a bagpipe unit zipped along, playing happy birthday on the pipes. So when everyone went inside, and the lights were turned off to cut the three‐layer cake—decorated with Mr. Lang's trademark, asparagus—no one was surprised. They weren't even too surprised when the lights didn't go back on. They just thought Karen was preparing something even more spectacular. ‘But,’ said Mr. Lang, who greatly admires his wife's ingenuity, ‘Even Karen couldn't black out the whole city. ‘No me worried about getting home,’ Mr. Lang reported. ‘When you're having a good time, you don't think about things like that.’”
Chapter 5: An Act of God or Gross Negligence?
“The plague of violence was still in progress when the city began looking for someone to blame-and settled on the proximate . . . and police wrestle a suspect into a patrol car target, Consolidated Edison, the giant utility that powers New York and its Westchester County suburbs. Con Ed faulted ‘an act of God’ for the blackout-four separate lightning strikes that hit its feeder lines in upper Westchester in less than an hour and set a chain reaction of switch-offs cascading southward to the city. But Mayor Beame, heating to a boil through the long delays at getting New York working again, called Con Edison’s performance ‘at the very least gross negligence-and,’ he added opaquely, ‘at the worst something far more serious.’ In one bitter passage, he proposed that the utility’s chairman, Charles F. Lute, be hanged; instead, he settled for a multiplicity of city, state and Federal investigations-the latter ordered on the spot by Jimmy Carter and begun with the unspoken premise that there might be something to Beame’s charge of negligence”. – Newsweek, “Heart of Darkness”
In 1977, New York City was dependent on electricity to a greater degree than ever before in its history. As Jack Feinstein, a member of the Con Ed team trying to get the city back up and running, put it, “New York City is a vertical city. There are people in apartment houses that are ten stories high. They don't have any water. They have no lights, and there is a sense of urgency. … We knew this was gonna be a long, drawn out affair. The restoration plan was out of date because it hadn't been updated since 1965 so between Charlie and I, we made up the plan. … We were moving in a step-by-step, very methodic, logical way of picking up the load. The generation was coming on slowly. I'm busy concentrating, and I turn around and there's the chairman of the board and the president of the company. … A blackout is almost similar to an airplane crash. It's never just one item. From the first lightning strike to the complete system shutdown, it's a series of events that if any one of 'em didn't occur, or was responded to differently, would've prevented the blackout.”
Durkin said much the same thing, adding, “I knew this was going to be a very difficult and challenging task to put the power system back together. It's really not made to shut down and restart. It's made to stay in service. …there's only two ways to restore the power. One is to bootstrap the system up on its own, or to bring power in from the outside. We both knew that the quickest, fastest way was to get power in from the outside. I said, "I'll take a part from the north. Jack, you take the part from the Long Island Lighting, and at some point we're gonna meet in the middle.””
As time wore on during that hot, dark night, people’s moods also became hotter and darker. Those who were not out looting stayed in their homes or sat outside talking to neighbors, and again and again the conversation turned to the question of why this had happened. Mayor Beame only stoked the fires of animosity more when he said in a 12:30 a.m. press conference, "We cannot tolerate, in this day and age, a system that can shut down the nation's largest city with a bolt of lightning in Rockland County.”
Even while they were working to restore power, Con Ed representatives had to take time to field questions from reporters about what caused the blackout. When reporter Gus Engelman asked Ed Livingston of Con Ed when the power might be back on, Livingston replied, “We can't, ah, we really can't estimate, Gus. We're working as hard as we can, ah, and as fast as we can, but I don't want to build up any hopes and pick a number of hours because we just can't be sure right now.”
Durkin explained how lay people pressed the professionals, even as the former had no idea how anything worked: “They just wanted me to proceed with a sense of urgency, which we were. Each time we came to a point where we could pick up another network, it took about 15 minutes. That doesn't seem like a lot of time when you're talking one network. But when you have 50 networks, it's a lot of time. Electricity is a kind of a keystone for civility, and if we can get the streetlights back on, the traffic lights working and all that kind of thing, there was a much better likelihood that the police and so forth can, can maintain control.”
By 2:00 a.m. on July 14, the lights came back on in parts of Queens and Pleasantville, but while that was good news, most places in the city were still without electricity. Thankfully, as the sun rose the next morning, light seemed to restore some sort of civility, as those who had spent the night looting went back home to hide and perhaps enjoy their newfound goods. Others who had passed the night inside ventured out to see what they had missed in the night. Chris Vanager, who had spent the night in an apartment with his mother, recalled touring the area around him: “When we got up that next day, I got on my bike and rode around the neighborhood, and you just saw everything was gone. And that's when it kind of sunk in that nothing's gonna be the same. You know, nothing's ever gonna be the same. And you just go, ‘What are people supposed to do now?’ You know?’” Trudging home after a night of meatball medicine, St. Martin looked around and saw the despair on the faces of the people who had lost so much during the night. He admitted, “Once the sun was up the storeowners were now there. Many of them had roots in the neighborhood and were actually connected to the neighborhood. So they were hurt, and we were hurt.” Marshal, too, admitted to discouragement, saying, “We got finished at about eight in the morning. I just, I sat on the hood of the car and looked down Broadway. I said, ‘I think the neighborhood's done. I think the back has finally been broken.’ And it was. I truly believe that that night took the carpet out from under the people.”
Quiñonez echoed that sentiment: “It sort of felt like some bomb had gone off, but instead of destroying the buildings all you had a whole bunch of confetti and paper. And it was a very quiet city. I think that one of the reasons for this quietness was because a lot of frustration had been released and even if you yourself had not gone out there to loot, others had. Somehow, I think, that brings you some sort of catharsis. … You can't hit your mom because she's your mom, so you hit your little brother. Something like that is what was happening. You couldn't go after these politicians that were killing your neighborhood, so you went after your little brother. You went after each other.”
Inevitably, the press was out in droves on the morning of the 14th, surveying the damage and interviewing those who had been affected. One reporter observed, “New York City in the early morning, after a night of no electric power and so no lights, elevators, subway trains or any trains, airports, air conditioning, traffic signals, television. What it did have in the dark streets was a wild outburst of crime, arson, looting, mugging, and a thousand false fire alarms.”
Most of those who spoke out that day were bitter, with one store owner bitterly remarking, “They got everything. I lost all my money. I work about 10 years for this. I lost everything. I don't have no insurance, no nothing. I have three kids, a wife. I lost everything…Well, I'm going to leave this great big apple to those that want to stay here. I can't fight this anymore.”
Another man who wished to remain anonymous sounded a similar tune: “You've got these people now, they are worried about their business as to whether they can start again in a community like this. As to whether they are gonna trust these people around here, I doubt it. The merchants, they are not going to trust these people after this. I wouldn't trust 'em.”
In fact, the blackout did drive many people out of the city, expanding the “white flight” to the suburbs to include people of many races who had or could raise the money to get away, but fortunately, not everyone felt so desperate. Elzora Williamson, who had stayed all night in her store to protect its goods, was in despair, but her husband had a remarkably different reaction: “They had taken so much. We lost, um, I think it was something like $350,000 worth of merchandise. My whole thought was, ‘How am I gonna stay in business?’ My husband, he just sat down with people who looted the store, talked to them, told 'em he was disappointed. But he never reacted in such a way that would've been a negative on his part. Now that was something I could not do. I could not sit down and look a person in the eye and say, ‘It's okay.’ It was not okay. No matter how long we stayed, the store never really was what it had been all those years ago.”
Alan Rubin, whose store suffered extensive losses, recalled his thoughts as he took stock of his store: “Early the next morning I walk into the store. And the lights were still out, but there's enough light for me to see where I'm going. It was horrendous. It was a lot of work. There was gonna be no guarantee that we can make it. More to cut out all the questions, not any major statement, I just put a sign on the window that said, ‘We're staying.’” In his mind, he had no choice, because, as he told another reporter, “I’m responsible for 25 families-the families of the people who work for me. What’s going to happen to them if I pull out? As bad as I got hit, there are other guys who got wiped out. What’s going to happen if they can’t reopen?”
Others tried against all reason to maintain hope. Reporter Tom Nicholson told one such story: “Al Everett, 47, sat on a crate in front of his ravaged radio and television repair shop in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn the day after looters had smashed in and made off with his entire inventory. Everett has no insurance, $8,000 in debts and a wife and four children to feed. If he could get a loan, he’d like to open up shop again in the same neighborhood; he knows the people and likes the work. But Everett has tried unsuccessfully before for loans and he knows the answer he would get this time. Instead, he clung to the forlorn hope that a customer might come by and drop off a television set for repair. ‘It only takes one person,’ he said earnestly, ‘and you’re in business again.’”
As people woke up to a new day and a new reality, Con Ed continued working to fix the situation. Once power was restored to JFK, the airport got its first plane in the air at just after 5:30 a.m. By 11:00 a.m., nearly half of the people of New York had their power back on, but there were still problems, especially in the poorer neighborhoods. Con Ed got its own power back on at around 2:30 p.m., and at 5:30 in the afternoon, the subways were running on a limited basis. Finally, just past 10:30 p.m., the final areas got their power back, and at midnight a tired but happy Mayor Beame announced that “the conditions at this hour are quiet in the streets."
Time magazine reported what conditions were like the day power came back on: “As evening fell on Thursday. The ghettos gradually returned to normal. On some streets there was almost a sense of camaraderie between the cops and the black and Hispanic youths. Some of the officers in Bedford-Stuyvesant swung their long riot sticks like golf clubs, sending tin cans and other debris flying out of the gutter. ‘Hey, man,’ called out a black youngster with a chuckle, ‘your grip is all wrong.’ In the South Bronx, a brightly lit Ferris wheel slowly revolved in the night sky, its two passenger chairs filled. Sporting shiny new Adidas jogging shoes, a young teenage boy in Harlem said with a trace of wistfulness: ‘Christmas is over.’”
Of course, that teenager’s holiday and that of the others who stole and committed arson that night came at a high price for those whose places suffered the looting. Time continued, “For the owners of the 2,000 stores that were plundered, Thursday was a day of reckoning their losses. It was a day of sweeping up debris, nailing plywood across jagged, broken windows, and pondering whether to reopen. … Those willing to reopen were eligible for low-interest loans of up to $500,000 from the Small Business Administration. More than 400 store owners asked for information about the loans, but many others were skeptical. They said that they had been stripped bare and demolished, that all they had worked and saved for over the years was gone, that it was financially and emotionally impossible for them to start again. Declared Stanley Schatel, owner of Nice & Pretty, a badly damaged sportswear store in Brooklyn: ‘Get a loan? Are you crazy’? You think anybody in his rightful mind would want to get back to this neighborhood?’ Yet quite a few merchants were thinking of doing just that. ‘I have to pay off the creditors,’ said Gary Apfel, owner of Lee’s Store, a men’s clothing store in Harlem. ‘I want to close, but I can’t afford to close.’”
The toll taken by the violence was much more than merely financial. For many, the emotional suffering it wrought far outpaced any physical pain. As Time noted, “More people than just store owners had to make fresh starts on the morning after the night of darkness. Rose Stevens, an elderly widow, wandered weeping down Broadway in Brooklyn, looking for a new place to live after spending the night alone in her $57-a-month apartment above a meat market that had been burned out by vandals ‘I wish I died,’ she cried. ‘I’m almost 70 years old, and I have no place to go.’”
The statistics reported in the wake of the blackout were staggering, with Time magazine telling readers, “Officers collared more than 3,500 people between the time the blackout struck and 7:40 a.m. Friday. when Beame declared the emergency over. The figure was about eight times the number of arrests in the riots of 1964 and 1968. The city’s courts and prisons were swamped. At Beame’s urging, prosecutors refused to plea bargain with suspected looters and arsonists or agree to release them without bail. As a result, police station houses and courthouse holding pens were jammed with prisoners-up to ten in small cells designed to hold one person. At the Manhattan criminal court, some prisoners shouted protests against the heat and overcrowding. To handle the overflow, the city reopened the Tombs, a Manhattan jail that had been closed by federal court order in 1974 as too decrepit. Feeding the prisoners was a serious problem at first because most restaurants had closed for lack of electricity. Many families brought food to relatives behind bars. Others subsisted on coffee and rolls.”
On the other side of the jail cells, Newsweek described the elation in the air as power was gradually restored, though it couldn’t help but include the pervading sense of foreboding thanks to the night of the blackout: “Cheers echoed down the brick-and-asphalt canyons as civilization switched back on. Lights lit. Air conditioners rumbled to life. Water splashed from taps. Subways ran. Traffic flowed. Elevators climbed skyward. Computers whirred. Stock tickers clattered. Stores and offices reopened. The fires in the ghettos and barrios burned low, leaving the lawful majority who live there to pick up the pieces of their neighborhoods and their lives. The Eight Million congratulated themselves one more time. But there was a contingent note in their cheering this time, born of the blackness of the night, the furies it loosed on New York-and the resigned feeling among the powerless that a city twice eclipsed in twelve years could go dark any time again.”
In the days that followed the blackout, the question most prevalent in everyone’s minds was what to do next. Nicholson reported, “At the weekend, Mayor Beame announced that the Small Business Administration had declared the city a disaster area, making the ravaged merchants eligible for long-term low-interest loans. That may persuade some of them to rebuild. But it did not end the debate over how much the city might suffer from this latest blow to its reputation. Citibank chairman Walter Wriston said he viewed the blackout as a ‘oneshot loss to the city’ in terms of lost sales taxes, adding: ‘We’ll all be playing catch-up ball for the next few days, but we will recover.’ Raymond D. Horton, a professor at Columbia University and staff director of the recently disbanded - -. -. Temporary Commission on City Finances, agreed. ‘We should be careful not to overreact,’ he cautioned. ‘It ain’t good, but it ain’t the end of the world.’ And even Gerald Sanderson, executive vice president of the Chicago convention and tourism bureau, had kind words for a competing city. ‘I’m sure there are a lot of people in New York now that are a little unhappy about being there,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think there will be a switch of conventions out of New York any more than a snowstorm here would affect us.’ But Peter Lauer, president of Lauer and Holbrook, a Chicago firm specializing in recruiting and placing executives in the $25,000-to-$100,000 bracket, noted: ‘We already were handling too many resumes from people who said they’d go anyplace in the country except New York. This blackout and looting wiIl only strengthen that feeling.’ The eventual price may not be all that high, but even so it will be one that battered New York can ill afford to pay. “
Taking it a step further, renowned columnist George Will may have put it best when he waxed philosophical about the city’s problems in the aftermath of the blackout: “Few things are as stimulating as other people’s calamities observed from a safe distance. So people relish Edward Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ and New York City’s perils, technological as well as financial. Much of the nation thinks, not without reason, that the city is sunk in darkness, even at high noon, and that the blackout was a sign of disapproval from above, a foretaste of fire and brimstone and pillars of salt. And let the records show that even the engineers resorted to theology, not physics, when they issued their first explanation in the dark. Consolidated Edison said the trouble, which started with a stroke of lightning, was ‘an act of God.’ The theology of the age is that God does not exist and that He manifests Himself in random unpleasantness. ‘Let us hope,’ prayed a thoroughly modern cleric (in a Peter de Vries novel involving a flood in suburbia), ‘that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.’ Consolidated Edison provides even the humblest of its customers with harnessed power beyond the dreams of Louis XIV. But its customers, like Oscar Wilde, who when shown Niagara Falls said it would be more impressive if it flowed the other way, are hard to please. Consolidated Edison’s customers reserve for it that special irritability Americans feel toward utilities and other institutions (such as government) that provide necessary services and then expect Americans to pay for them. Like an oil embargo, a blackout (a brief but convincing energy crisis) demonstrates the fragility of the arrangements, social and technological, on which cities depend. And in this blackout, the nation again saw frenzy clothed as purposeful action.”
Online Resources
Other books about New York City by Charles River Editors
Other books about 20th century American history by Charles River Editors
Other books about the blackout on Amazon
Bibliography
Frum, David (2000). How We Got Here: The '70s. New York, New York: Basic Books.
Goodman, James (2003), Blackout. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Mahler, Jonathan (2005). Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning. New York: Farrar, Straus and Girous